Surgery Goes Global

The world’s poorest countries have more than two-thirds of the globe’s people, but less than one-quarter of the world’s surgeries, according to World Bank president Jim Yong Kim.

Saying that surgery was an “indivisible, indispensable part of health care,” Kim, who is also the former chair of the Harvard Medical School Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, welcomed commissioners, advisors and researchers to the launch of a Lancet Commission on Global Surgery in a recorded message. He said that achieving more equitable distribution of surgical care was a key part of World Bank and World Health Organization goals to achieve universal access to health care within a generation.